Construction Club prime example of CLC community partnerships

Lincoln’s Community Learning Centers (CLCs) offer students from Lincoln Public Schools the opportunity to participate in about 520 after-school clubs per week, spread out among all 26 CLC sites.

Nearly all of these clubs are made possible through community partnerships and volunteers. There’s no better example than the Construction Club at the Arnold Elementary School CLC.

The idea for the club was hatched during a conversation between Dayna Krannawitter, the Arnold CLC school community coordinator, and Katie Wilson, executive director of the Associated General Contractors Nebraska Chapter, a statewide construction trade association.

“We started talking about getting employment experience and job skills experience to kids early on in life, earlier than middle school and high school,” Krannawitter said.

Students in the Construction Club learn through a variety of activities, such as building a detour around a bathroom to account for traffic flow and using concrete forms and wooden blocks to build structures they design.

One of the club’s volunteers, Steve Ragoss from MTZ Construction, said it may be on a smaller scale but the students are learning about what construction professionals do every day. “You draw a plan, you build, you execute the plan and see if it works,” he said.

Olivia, a club member and third-grader at Arnold, said she’s learned even more than that.

“Sometimes things don’t work out but you can make different things that do,” she said.

“And you can share your ideas,” added fellow club member Emily, a fifth-grader at Arnold.

Krannawitter emphasized that the Construction Club - and other clubs like it - offer hands-on, real-world learning experiences that aren’t usually available during the school day.

“We could not do as much as we do without our community partnerships,” she said. “We have lots of great partners that come in and provide these great learning experiences for our kids.”

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